TripleByte, which was founded by one of Y Combinator’s earliest partners Harj Taggar, is trying to make it easier for startups to hire technical talent by pre-screening them for their coding abilities.
Now they’re extending this idea a step further with a new concierge program to fly engineering candidates out for interviews with multiple YC companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Once a potential hire passes technical interviews, TripleByte will line up several on-site interviews with various companies they’re interested in. They’ll pick them up from the airport, book a hotel and take them to each company.
“The goal is to encourage more people from outside of the Silicon Valley startup world to think about coming out here and finding great companies to join,” Taggar said.
Taggar founded TripleByte after dealing with all of the complexities of technical hiring while working on multiple startups and as a YC partner. He started thinking about ways to automate the hiring process, and how traditional resumes and referrals often create blind spots that leave out perfectly good candidates who don’t necessarily have MIT or Stanford on their CVs.
Instead, TripleByte does an initial online technical screen that’s completely blind to a candidate’s background. After that comes a 15-minute phone call discussing a technical project, then a 45-minute screen share interview where the candidate writes code. The last part involves a two-hour screen share where they do a larger coding project.
So far, the startup has done about 600 interviews and shared some of their learnings here. They found that the initial programming quiz was a good predictor of success, while interviews where a candidate talks about past projects is not.
TripleByte is part of a new wave of start-ups that is relying on software in addition to human screenings to surface talent.